Napoleon’s Foreign Minister – Charles-Maurice Talleyrand-Perigord – once said that a man has been given eyes in the front of his head so that he can look forward, instead of backward. When Napoleon discovered that Talleyrand was betraying him to his enemies, Napoleon told him to his face he was “so much shit in a […]

Earlier this year respectable western newspapers told their readers that Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, was a close neighbour of President Vladimir Putin’s. This bit of geography was a plant from Khodorkovsky’s public relations machine, intended to convince those Americans to whom Khodorkovsky was trying to sell his Yukos shares, that Khodorkovsky and Putin […]